A Jewish student at the University of California at Davis was told
that the Star of David was a hate symbol. A student at UC Santa Cruz,
a veteran of the Israeli military, was frequently called a “baby
killer” on campus. Protests at various UC campuses regularly
analogize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi genocide
against Jews. Among these protests is an annual “Israel Apartheid
Week” which features stunts like mock “die-ins,” in which students
pretending to be Palestinians collapse as if they had been killed en
masse by Israelis.

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Together, these events illuminate a pattern of pervasive anti-Israel
sentiment on UC campuses, at least some of which rises to the level
of actual anti-Semitism. That disturbing pattern is set forth in
detail in a July 9 report compiled by the UC Advisory Council on
Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion created in 2010 by UC
President Mark Yudof. The report concludes that UC campuses play host
to a

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“movement which targets Israel and Zionism through an ongoing
campaign of protests, anti-Israel/anti-Zionism ‘weeks,’ and, on some
campuses, the use of the academic platforms to denounce the Jewish
state and Jewish nationalist aspiration.”

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Those findings are deeply troubling, and if they have not received
the media coverage they deserve it is mostly because they have been
overshadowed by another part of the advisory council’s report –
namely, it’s no less troubling recommendation that “UC should adopt a
hate speech-free campus policy” as a way to silence the speech that
dismays so many Jewish students supportive of Israel.

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Thus, the report’s authors lament that “UC does not have a hate-free
policy that allows the campus to prevent well-known bigoted and hate
organizations from speaking on campus” and insists that “UC should
push its current harassment and nondiscrimination provisions further,
clearly define hate speech in its guidelines, and seek opportunities
to prohibit hate speech on campus.” To that end, the council calls on
President Yudof to task his general counsel with
finding “opportunities to develop policies that give campus
administrators authority to prohibit such activities on campus.” Most
brazenly, the council notes that while banning speech on campus would
likely provoke a legal challenge, it suggests “that UC accept the
challenge” and adopt such policies anyway.

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The council is right to worry about the legal implications of
outlawing hate speech. Banning speech — even extremely offensive
speech — is clearly illegal and has long been recognized as such by
the courts. That is especially true in the context of academia, which
has been seen as a preserve of free expression. The council’s call
for bans on anti-Israel hate speech is thus an invitation to violate
the constitutional right to free speech in the name of campus
sensitivity. “The First Amendment guarantees that Americans have the
right to engage in speech and this includes speech that others might
deem hateful,” notes Robert Shibley of the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education (FIRE). “There is abundant legal precedent for
this proposition and what this report seems to recommend flies right
in its face.”

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If there were compelling reasons for running roughshod over the First
Amendment, the council fails to cite them. It asserts that students
should be protected from “harassment and intimidation” but never
explains why this cannot be accomplished by the university’s current
policies on student conduct and discipline or why free speech should
be sacrificed in the process.

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The issue might be more complicated were the anti-Israel speech that
students find offensive accompanied by physical threats but the
council concedes that this is not at all the case, and in fact notes
that “not one Jewish student indicated that they perceive the Jewish
student community as physically unsafe at UC.” On the rare occasions
when attacks on Israel have gone beyond permissible free speech,
universities have punished the conduct. In 2010, for instance, 11
students shouted down a speech by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at
UC Irvine. That was a shameful incident and the school brought
appropriate punishment against the offending students: Ten of the
students were convicted on misdemeanor charges for civil disturbance
and sentenced to three years of informal probation. In light of this
precedent, it is perhaps not surprising that the best the council can
do to justify a ban on speech is to allude to some
unspecified “complex dynamics” of the student “experience” that
ostensibly justify such a ban. More should be required to trump free
speech, however objectionable the ideas it expresses.

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This is not to suggest that the council’s report is worthless. While
it’s call for speech restrictions is misguided, it does point to
several major problems with the anti-Israel climate on UC campuses.
At both the faculty and administrative level, there seems to be a
widespread double standard that tolerates attacks on Israel that
would be tolerated against no other country. It’s not hard to imagine
a campus uproar if pro-Israel students staged mock “bomb ins” in
which they dressed up as Palestinian protestors and pretended to blow
up Israeli civilians, let alone if they questioned Palestine’s right
to exist, yet vicious attacks on Israel and its legitimacy are rarely
deplored by UC professors, many of whom actively support anti-Israel
(and arguably anti-Semitic) campaigns like Boycotts, Divestment and
Sanctions Campaign against Israel.

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That the anti-Israel cause is embraced by many UC professors also
highlights the demonstrable lack of intellectual balance on UC
faculties. That lack of balance may also act to stifle debate about
Israel on UC campuses. For instance, according to the council’s
report, many students complain that academic departments do not
exhibit balance in their sponsorship or hosting of events like
symposia and speaker series as they relate to Israel and Zionism. If
true, this would be a serious indictment of the political and
ideological rigidity of the UC system and its failure to uphold a
genuine marketplace of ideas.